Free from Death Road
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Try as I did, I couldn’t find anything to feel positive about in my past life. Running the streets wasn’t what life was supposed to be about. Constantly looking over one’s shoulder wasn’t what was supposed to make life exciting. Mugging people, taking things away from people, intimidating people, shooting at people were all immoral, wrong, and against God’s will. Could I have done better with my life? Why not? I could have stayed in school, gotten my high school diploma, and gone on to college, like a couple of our boys did. I thought of how life could have been for me if I had gone to college; my mother would most certainly have been very proud of me; so would my sisters and brothers. My family would have been proud to come to my graduation ceremonies from high school and college, instead of spending all that time coming downtown to get me out of jail. Poor Genell, mother. She had been the one and only person I knew I could depend on no matter what the problem was. She had no choice but look out for me, and support me even if she didn’t like what I was doing and the life I had chosen to lead. I was her son and she had taken care of me since I was a little kid all by herself. If she didn’t, who would have? She had no choice, or did she? I knew my mother loved me and wanted the best for me and I had messed up royally. They would come to my funeral one of these days, if I continued to lead the criminal life. The pain I might have caused her; the money she had wasted getting me out of jail and paying for lawyers; the countless hours of sleeplessness she might have spent worrying about me, and praying that nothing happened to me. Did my mother deserve it? No. She hadn’t raised me to be a bad boy, to run the streets, to be a gang leader; she had tried to steer me in the right direction; to stay away from trouble; to fear God, to respect my elders. But the streets had turned out to be a more powerful force, offering me things I didn’t have at home. In the gang I found a ready-made family that gave me a sense of belonging, and control over my life, a home away from home. It wasn’t my fault; it was a combination of things, and forces too powerful to resist; peer pressure, the allure of the easy life, big cars and girls and drugs, and money. Yet it had all come down to this; in this hell hole of a cell in Jamesville prison, after I had been forced to tell lies about my friends and to betray my mentor, in exchange for what: a shorter time in jail all the same, not for freedom. Why go back to the same life? How different would it be? What guarantee was there that I wouldn’t end back up in here? What guarantee was there that I wouldn’t end up killing somebody and end up in jail for life, or be put to death, for taking someone’s life? What would make me think that I would survive in the streets, without getting killed myself, in a gang shootout, or by the police, or by a would-be victim? What did I have to show for life in streets, after all those years? Nothing much; not much in the form of material possessions. I didn’t have a big stash in the bank, or hidden somewhere waiting for me to get out. Nor did I have a big house in the suburbs or in the hood. My big old Cadillac was perhaps all I had to my name, and it was nothing but a fancy car that would be outdated by the time I got out of jail, that is, if whoever took possession would take care of it as I did. More than likely, the car would be dogged and inoperable by the time I got out. I would have to start all over again; in practically every area of life. My children would have to learn to relate to me after I had been gone for so long; my old lady, too, would have to start adjusting to me being back home, that is, if she hang around and waited for me. That was another thing to think about: the strong possibility that my old lady wouldn’t stick with me to the end. It happened all the time; dudes go to jail and lose their wives and girlfriends to people on the outside, and nobody blames the females for it. The females need a life, too. They couldn’t put their lives on hold, just sit around, and wait for the man to get out of jail, or visit dudes in jail, and wait for them to come back home. The younger type of females weren’t so docile, or committed to their men, once they got in trouble and got locked up. They might wait for a few months, perhaps a year or so, and then they would start doing things with other people that you used to do with them, and before you knew it, they had begun new relationships and a new man had taken your place. If I continued on death road, I stood to lose in the end. One day I would be too old to run the streets and what would I do then? It would be too late, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, even if I wanted to.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
General Davis was once described by the media as one of the most infamous criminals to emerge in Central New York. In the late seventies and early eighties, he was one of the key figures in the creation and running of the Corleones a gang of inner city youth whose members were responsible for committing various crimes in and around the city of Syracuse. As the leader of the gang, and for almost two decades, he led a life of crime. General Davis was arrested several times and charged with a number of crimes, many of them serious enough to warrant long jail sentences, had he been convicted. Yet in spite of many highly publicized trials, he succeeded in beating most of the charges, and didn’t serve any long jail sentences. He was unstoppable, it seemed, until several members of the gang were implicated in a daring armed robbery that General Davis found himself facing a jail sentence. Even then, he managed to secure for himself a short jail sentence. In prison, he found religion and decided to dedicate himself to helping to teach, counsel and guide the youth to stay away from crime, violence, drugs and the streets, and to stick to getting an education. It is a poignant life story that delves into the gangster lifestyle and reveals the inner most feelings of a young African American who figured out a way to survive shoot outs with rival gang members, ambushes, constant harassment from law enforcement agencies, and finally dealing with the frustration of life as an ex-convict and ex- gang leader.
About the Author
General Davis was born in Syracuse, New York, while Kofi Quaye is an immigrant from Ghana in West Africa. Both reside in Syracuse where Kofi Quaye has lived for the past two decades, and has been actively involved in the media, as a journalist, editor and publisher. General Davis is widely known as an ex-gang leader whose claim to fame was his ability to escape a long prison term for after being arrested more than sixty to seventy times for committing al kinds of crimes. Their collaboration on this book is a groundbreaking event in publishing; it is the first time, an African and an African American written a book together on such a subject. Kofi Quaye was already an established author before arriving in Syracuse. He had published a series of crime and mystery novels in Africa, which made him one of the first African writers to write about urban life and crime in Africa. Included in the books he has published are JOJO IN NEW YORK, FOLI FIGHTS THE FORGERS (Macmillan, England,) SAMMY SLAMS THE GANG (Moxon Paperbacks Ltd, Accra, Ghana,) No Deal, (Heritage Communications, Syracuse, NY) Since the late seventies, Kofi Quaye has edited newspapers and magazines and contributed articles to leading publications including Essence Magazine, The Black American Weekly, the Impartial Citizen and others. In the early eighties, he founded the Heritage Newsmagazine, and continues to write and publish.